I totally did not get permission to use this image.
In a famous scene in The Empire Strikes Back, Luke tells Yoda, “I am looking for a great warrior.” The Jedi Master giggles and says, “Wars make not one great.” Wise Yoda is.
Today, we have a subculture, or movement, that actively uses the term “social justice warrior.” Originally people liked the term, but it became a mocking term used by conservatives. Here, I want to think about the original spirit, the idea that it is good to “fight for social justice” or be a “warrior” for social justice. Should we be “warriors” or “fighters?”
Generally, when people say they fight for social justice, they mean that there is some large scale form of inequality that needs to be challenged. On this, I am deeply sympathetic. How can anyone not be outraged by the harms that we have levied upon each other? Imagine how many families would be intact had we never gone down the road of mass incarnation in the 1990s and wide-scale deportations in the 2010s. It’s staggering.
But then what? Once you recognize injustice, you have a choice. If you decide that you want to do something, you have to decide how to do it. A key issue is how you treat the other side in your struggle. Of course, there are life and death situations that require you to harm the other side. I find no fault, for example, with the Polish partisan in the Warsaw uprising shooting back. But that’s not the world most of us live in. The immediate choice between life and death is not the issue for most of us, it’s about changing social practices and institutions in ways that stop ruining the lives of others.
For me, I view the “other side” from a sort of Christian perspective. People are valuable and love is how we should treat them, even if they are horrendously wrong. I learned this from MLK’s writings. He drew his philosophy of non-violence from Christian and Ghandian ideas, such as satyagraha. The crux is that love should motivate your actions and truth should be your goal. Then, you seek to change what people do and you may even change who they are, but you do not destroy or vanquish enemies.
The other approach is to view social conflict was an opportunity to punish the other side. I think this is what motivates the most excessive cancel culture incidents. When I read about them, I find that I am sometimes in agreement with the protester’s main points and I completely support their right to make noise in support of their position. But what would motivate a crowd of students to essentially start a mini-riot at a Charles Murray talk? Or encourage students at elite law schools to engage in all sorts of campaigns to shut down speakers, like the recent disputes at Stanford or Yale? Or demanding that philosophy journals retract articles whose arguments they disagree with? Or asking science fiction magazines to pull a critically acclaimed story for using gender identity as a metaphor? It’s probably the idea that the opposition represents an existential threat and allowing wrong voices to be heard is the same as directly harming others.
Social change requires confrontation, but the goals and methods of confrontation matter. If you frame social conflict as a zero-sum game, then vanquishing the opponent makes sense. That’s where you get yelling matches and write ups in conservative websites. But if transformation is the goal, then you’ll move away from the idea that you are fighting and waging war against injustice and move toward loving the enemy as a first step toward a better world.
Bottom line: Social justice wars not make one great, seeing the humanity of opponents makes one great.
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My books: Grad Skool Rulz - cheap advice manual for grad students / The history of Black Studies / Obama and the antiwar movement / A Social Theory book you will enjoy reading / Intro Sociology for $1 per chapter